The trouble with toner… February 29, 2012

It would be wrong not to mention in passing the Aengus Ó Snodaigh toner cartridge story which, on some levels, is highly entertaining. But perhaps not one that he would find that funny.

Best tweet? … word has it AOS is in possession of a hard copy of the internet.

He certainly won’t be the only TD and Senator who it can be fairly said has overused the facilities available or is overusing them. But he’s been caught.

“Excessive” seems charitable when describing industrial level quantities of toner cartridges being used. And what’s inexplicable is that it was thought that none of this would come to light. FOI’s are an handy instrument for the press to unearth some of the ambiguities and worse of life within the Oireachtas. So it was never a case of if this would be examined in the cold light of day, but when.

That in a way is almost as bad as the ‘excessive’ usage in itself. Sure, no crime was committed, no rule broken, but the perception is far from great.

It’s difficult to judge whether this will be a nine-day wonder, or even just a one day wonder. The news of the referendum certainly displaced it fairly rapidly. But it is a chink in the armour of O’Snodaigh, who by any lights is an hard-working representative and fairly clearly to the left within SF.

Long term impacts, if any? Any thoughts?

*pic added by IEL🙂

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Seriously though . . . he’ll have to put his hand much deeper into the till to compete with the Bank Guarantee crowd. . . (assuming it wasn’t someone else in the party who had sticky fingers. . . or that they genuinely did print a lot of leaflets).

Basically, it’ll take more than this to have a really damaging effect, won’t it?

Wait til I write a post headed ‘the trouble with Wolfe Toner’… Somehow some set of circumstances will arrive allowing for it. But yeah, I imagine it will. He was blessed by the referendum though the Indo made valiant efforts today to focus on it do I’m told.

Bit of an interest here in that I’m a member of a cumann in Aengus’ constituency. In retrospect, it was a wee bit excessive, but we did go through them very quickly. In the last month, for my cumann alone, we’ve gone through 15,000 double sided B&W A4 printed leaflets and a double sided A4 single sheet mailout of a couple of thousand.

And that’s one cumann out of four, quite apart from the normal day-to-say constituency work that the office would be doing.

I do accept the perception isn’t great but I think even his worst critics know Aengus wasn’t wandering pubs in Ballyfermot selling toner cartridges to fund his lavish lifestyle.

It’s obviously a conspiracy. Aengus O Snodaigh’s brother Rossa O Snodaigh is a member of the band Kila and has written articles for the Journal of Music in Ireland. The editor of the JMI is TONER Quinn. Quinn is also the surname of a leading Labour Party politician. Who gains most if Sinn Fein lose credibility? Labour. It all smells very fishy to me.

How many leaflets do SF say they produced with O’Snodaigh’s toner cartridges in the two year period?
According to Pearse Doherty on the Pat Kenny morning programme, 54000 back to back A4 size leaflets, quoting Dell’s figures.
O’Snodaigh was the only Dublin area TD Sinn Féin had at the time.